<nettime> Study Finds Problems With Web Class

[nettimes_roving_reporter <nettime-l@bbs.thing.net>]

<http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/09/cyber/education/22education.html>

September 22, 1999

By PAMELA MENDELS Bio 

Study Finds Problems With Web Class

     The online field trip to a virtual campus was marred by confusion.
     The assignments on the class Web site left students bewildered. The
     flood of messages to the class e-mail discussion list left many
     recipients feeling inundated. Technical problems interfered with
     work.
     
     The result for the graduate students who enrolled in B555, the
     fictitious name of a real Web-based course offered by a university
     two years ago, could be summarized in one word: frustration.
     
     And that, say two researchers who have written a case study about
     the class, points to a need for a serious examination of what they
     call a taboo subject in academia: the problems with Web-based
     distance education.
     
     Rob Kling, a professor at Indiana University in Bloomington and the
     study's co-author said "there are a lot of good potentials" for
     technology in education. But, he added, "There are a lot of
     limitations and, further, it is neither simple nor cheap."
     
     These are fighting words for techno-enthusiasts extolling the
     possibilities of new media and education. But they cannot be
     dismissed as coming from Luddites suspicious of technological
     innovation. Kling is a prominent professor of information systems
     and information science as well as a professor of computer science.
     His co-author and the study's investigator, Noriko Hara, is a
     graduate student interested in instructional uses of technology.
     
     That may be the reason their paper, a working draft now being
     revised, is beginning to attract attention. Hara has received about
     60 requests for copies of it, since word of the paper began
     circulating on education-related e-mail lists in August. And both
     she and Kling have been asked to present the paper at a conference
     next month on new media and learning.
     
     William H. Dutton, a professor at the University of Southern
     California and one of the conference organizers, invited them
     because, he says, the often boosterish attitude toward Web-based
     education stands in marked contrast to the paucity of research into
     students' reactions to it. "There is a great deal of enthusiasm,
     but perhaps less of a critical perspective than there should be,"
     he said.
     
     The study in question is a limited one. The report looks at just
     one class -- and a small one at that -- so it is not a survey of
     distance education courses as a whole, and few if any
     generalizations can be drawn from it. But, Dutton said, such case
     studies are instructive because they raise questions that can
     prompt further research. He believes the findings will resonate
     with many people who have tried to teach online. "It forces people
     to deal with very real issues about the usability of current
     systems," he said.
     
     B555 was offered by what the authors describe as a "major
     university" in fall, 1997. The study offers few identifying
     details, because the authors promised confidentiality to the
     students and their instructor.
     
     But this much is known. The subject of the class involved the use
     of technology for teaching languages. Eight masters' degree
     students enrolled initially: five campus students and three
     off-campus students. Two of the long-distance students dropped the
     class because of problems with the technology.
     
     The instructor, who was foreign-born, was a Ph.D. candidate who was
     asked to teach the course after its designer, a faculty member in
     her program, fell ill.. The instructor had never taught a distance
     education course. She had, however, taken the class herself and had
     had a hand in the design of the B555 Web site. The class never met
     face-to-face, but was conducted largely through e-mail discussion
     and assignments posted on a Web site.
     
     Hara had begun the study expecting to hear a lot of enthusiasm for
     it. Instead, she said, she found frustration far beyond what one
     would expect in a small class. The amount of e-mail traffic
     generated by the class was one source of complaints, Hara found. In
     one typical week, for example, students received 35 messages about
     the class, which at the time they considered too cumbersome. One
     student quoted in the study commented that "just talking in
     conversation would be so much easier."
                                                                         
     The students were not the only ones who felt the e-mail load was
     too great. "The instructor also commented that at the beginning of
     the semester he was spending all day doing nothing but reading and
     responding to e-mail messages," the study says. "Later in the
     semester, she was able to reduce the workload, but still spent a
     large chunk of time on this course."
     
     Students were also frustrated by the potential for misunderstanding
     inherent in electronic communication. In one online chat session
     during a "virtual" field trip to a community Web site, a student
     wrote in a chat that she liked "calling rows," prompting another
     student to tell Hara that she assumed her classmate meant "calling
     role."
     
     "Sometimes it's confusing, the teacher and half the students are
     non-native speakers," the second student complained.
     
     Confusion cropped up in other ways on the trip. One student failed
     to master commands necessary to make her words appear on the screen
     during the chat, despite having practiced using the technology.
     Another found the text conversation scrolled too quickly for her to
     absorb -- and then disappeared. Over the course of the semester,
     students became flustered because they did not receive frequent or
     detailed enough responses by e-mail from their instructor. "One of
     the problems is that I'd like to have feedback. A kind of constant
     feedback," another student said.
     
     Others failed to grasp what the teacher expected when she posted
     assignments. "I usually don't understand what she wants, either
     e-mail or from the Web site," one student told Hara.
     
     Still another student was disoriented by the lack of visual cues
     that students receive from teachers in a classroom. He complained
     to Hara that he had received little response from the instructor
     about his contributions to the class e-mail discussion, and didn't
     know how to interpret this. In a traditional setting, he said, "You
     can tell from the classroom what the professor thinks about you
     from the body language and the way they talk."
     
     Some people who have read the paper, however, think it unfairly
     criticizes Web courses. "I thought overall this was condemning
     distance learning in ways that distance learning does not deserve
     to be condemned," said Carrie Heeter, a professor of
     telecommunication at Michigan State University.
     
     For example, she believes much of the frustration in the class
     stemmed from human rather than technical problems. One example was
     the time the teacher failed to send out assignments according to
     her usual schedule. "That doesn't have to do with an online course.
     That's a professor not doing what they say they would," Heeter
     said.
     
     In addition, she said, she believes some of the problems in the
     class could have been handled through technological tweaking.
     Bulletin boards devoted to specific class topics, for example,
     might have proved a more manageable form of discussion than e-mail
     lists.
     
     Kling responds that to blame human or other problems for the
     frustration felt by the online students is to beg the question of
     what happens when universities transfer courses to the Web. There
     will always be bad teachers and institutional problems such as a
     graduate student being asked to teach a course he or she has not
     drawn up, Kling said. The question is, what happens when
     inexperienced teachers teach online?
     
     However, Kling said the next version of the paper will make clear
     that the course instructor had a reputation for being a good
     classroom teacher. The problem, apparently, was that she had failed
     to receive adequate orientation in Web pedagogy.
     
     Kling said if university administrators are going to push distance
     education, they must begin to recognize that teaching online is not
     the same as teaching in a classroom. Both teachers and students
     need to understand this and be better prepared to handle the
     differences, he said.
     
     Kling believes that researchers have so far overlooked the thorny
     details of what is involved with online pedagogy, while extolling
     the educational potential of technology.
     
     "The professional literature and even the scholarly literature
     about activities related to the use of computer networks tend to be
     upbeat, optimistic and at times even utopian," he said. He also
     noted that to look at the literature on the subject, one would not
     have "a clue that issues of the kinds we identified could happen,
     let alone be thought through and engaged."
     
     Walter S. Baer, a senior policy analyst at the Rand Corp. who has
     written about the Internet and technology, agrees. He says the
     study is useful in pointing out problems that are hardly unique to
     B555. "I think similar frustrations are arising in many
     institutions around the country," he said.
     
   Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company

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